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07/29/2003 Archived Entry: ""

Earlier today I blogged about the Pentagon's establishing a futures market in terrorism, allowing investors to profit from betting on the likelihood of such events as a biochemical attack. Now: this just in from the New York Times...and, yeah, I think we can believe the account despite the source...Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror. An interesting sidebar: as Brad followed up on the links I provided to the PAM site, items kept disappearing from the site every time he "refreshed". For example, the model of how to bid on -- that is, invest in -- whether or not a biochemical attack would happen in "X-specified timeframe" in Israel -- suddenly was not there...from one moment to the next. The mock chance to bet on the overthrow or assassination of Arafat suddenly disappeared. PAM became the incredible shrinking website. Orwell would have been delighted or horrified or, perhaps, both simulataneously at the memory hole into which this entire debacle has been dumped. Indeed, this is the message you now receive when trying to access the PAM site: "Not Found The requested URL /pam_home.htm was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."